Another fun group has shown up on Facebook…Memories of Patch. Administered by Jamie Santee, PSA Social Media Manager, the site is a wonderful stroll through memory lane. There are great sentimental comments as well as humorous recollections. It’s amazing how many people had the end of their scribe “accidentally” fall off and go scooting across the ice. I’ll share some of the comments here or you can follow the group.

Gerry Lane - Things I remember...the skater who during the quiet of patch would take a digger and the rancorous applause and the ensuing cat calls from their fellow patchers...the new 8th tester who would push as hard as they could the first day on back paragraph brackets and go flying into the next skaters patch when they caught their edge...the newbie who would skate across everyone's patch to get to their’s...

Allison Manley - The past few years the Oregon Skating Council in Portland has been holding a figures competition every late summer, and I hope they are doing it again this year.
Check out the link to last year's event: http://oregonskating.org/allfigures.html

Jennifer Laumann Cohen - My brother and I shared a scribe and we would first try and position ourselves strategically so that we could loosen the top and try to hit each other when it flew off... all while our mom was giving lessons on the same ice....double points for hitting mom or her student...good times!

Denise Nelson Hughes -Scented magic markers! Cherry was my favorite :)
Terrie White Neukirch - One of our favorite exercises to make our brackets, counters, and rockers deeper was to place our guards at the top of our turn and see how far we could kick it with our skating foot...needless to say there were times that guards would be flying all over the ice!

Angie Riviello-Steffano - I remember when I took my preliminary figure test. I was so nervous that when I pushed off for my outside eight, I didn’t curve…..I went straight and ran right into the judge. That was probably one of my most horrific skating moments. Thank God she was alright and they let me start over…... I remember just wanting to crawl off the ice. Many years later, I learned to love figures! I use to always tell my little students the story before they took their preliminary figure test, they always laughed and after that, any mistake they made was never as bad as mine.

David K. Lee - Ah, early morning patch. There was a distinct smell in the arena, and a quietness that made the least little noise echo. Are these common memories, or things I just dreamed, because I might still have been asleep at 5 or 6 in the morning, while on patch?

Janet Wright - To those of us who started patch on outdoor ice, I can remember learning more about meteorology than I thought possible. For a three-lobed figure, the ice is different at each end - particularly if one end is in the sun and the other in the shade. ...

James Santee - I remember skating in the last outdoor ISU event- the 1979 Junior World Championship in Augsburg, Germany. The rink had a roof but was open on three sides. For my second figure, a change bracket, I decided to use the shade line that went down the change of edge and the short axis of my figure. I finished the bracket and was only half paying attention when a cloud overhead erased the "line"...I panicked and missed the center by almost two feet… LOL.

James Cristbrook - Early mornings when it rained on the metal roof of the rink and everything was quiet except for that constant rumble of rain pelting down. I loved those quiet times on my own little rectangle of ice! Oh, yeah ... and loosening the end of my scribe so it would go flying off into parts unknown!!!

Louella Rehfield - I began knitting and crocheting at age 11 and now, 70 years later, I am still at it. I began skating before Mr. Zamboni invented you-know-what and ice was made by hand, which took 45 min.

Debbie Weinstein Minter - Patching next to Charlie Tickner and Ted Engelking---they had the deepest turns I'd ever seen! I also remember the time someone's blade came off and "skated" across my patch. Another memory is when I was competing a back change loop while a moth crawled into one of the loops and died!